You wouldn’t download a car, would you? Heck yes you would, and you probably will when you see the gorgeous lines on this 1960 Chevrolet Corvette for The Sims 3. Even Sims 3 players who don’t download a lot of custom content will probably want to download this because it provides a really nice alternative to the quite frankly, face-offendingly ugly cars that come with the base game. It’s almost as if someone at EA doesn’t really like motor vehicles and is on a mission to prove that they’re all a massive waste of time. This downloadable car was lovingly pixel crafted by the Fresh Prince.

There’s been some awesome stuff going up on MTS (Mod the Sims) lately, and the Apocalypse Dining Set by modder Maylin is some of that stuff. A six piece set with six new meshes, including a dining table made out of a rusty oil drum and a battered old door, old tyres and toolboxes for chairs, and a dead plant and dead rat for decoration, this does more for a dreary ambiance in The Sims 3 than setting your sim’s house on fire. This is a very high quality set that I’ve enjoyed playing with a great deal. My basement dungeon finally has furniture that works with it, not against it. The meshes are recolorable, so you can tweak these new objects to just the right shade of despair and misery.

So you want to learn how to cheat your way through Oblivion? Want to know how to activate god mode? Get infinite money? Generally punch all the faces? Here are two resources I found invaluable in the pursuit of cheating in Oblivion and eventually breaking the game. (Not in the physical sense, rather in the ‘well now I’m a super god everything is boring I guess I’ll go have another existential crisis’ sense.)

Oblivion Cheat Codes (These help you toggle god mode, set the bounty on your character’s head to 0 and generally mess with the world as you know it.)

Oblivion Item Codes (You need these for when you decide that you need 500 potions of strong healing and 5,00,000,000 gold pieces.)

DLC is undeniably the digital documentation of the spawn of the devil, but every time EA comes out with a new world for The Sims 3, I buy it and I download it old school legit styles for the purposes of review, because I know how important it is that we the people know whether or not we should spend our hard earned money on new Sims 3 worlds.

In which I speculate on the content of Hidden Springs and mention the price…

Hidden Springs, a world that allegedly contains the fountain of youth and will allow your sims to remain young forever, is either 2,450 sim points, or 2,250 sim points, depending on whether or not you get it on ‘special’. In real money that works out to 22.50 or 24.50 roughly.

The world comes with over twenty exclusive items, including things that you’ve always desired, like a slightly different letterbox design and a fairly non-descript fountain (probably the fountain of youth, now I think about it.)

There are also alleged new locations, though we’ll see how many of those are actually new locations and not just new rabbit holes to stare at gormlessly whilst your sim disappears inside for a good long while. There’s nothing more demoralizing than realizing you’re spending the precious minutes of your life playing a game in which you are forced to imagine what your character is doing, because the developer decided it would be better to show you a progress bar with a coffee cup above it than bother to create the cafe your sim is in.

In which I first set eyes on Hidden Springs…

One word came to mind when I first laid eyes on Hidden Springs: sparse. Okay, maybe two words. Sparse and spacious. The designers have done a wonderful job of creating the feel of a mountain / lake front town. Sims are going to have to travel great distances to get from one side of Hidden Springs to the other. The dirt roads that connect many of the locations on the outskirts of Hidden Springs are a very nice touch too.

Like almost everyone else waiting for Skyrim, I’ve been playing Oblivion a lot lately. But not as well as The Ninja Cowboy has been, that’s for sure. This is one Oblivion Machinima you’ll play more than once. Probably. (I found this after googling the term ‘Bored with Oblivion’, and it taught me that any boredom I might be experiencing was my own darned fault.)